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Only a few months after closing a Series B round of $60 million that valued the ephemeral messaging company at $800 million, Snapchat has been in talks for another funding that values it at up to $3.6 billion, according to sources close to the situation.

Sources also added that the funding itself would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars and that the lead investor might be a strategic party from Asia.

Such a deal could still fall apart, of course, but the effort has become well known among several Silicon Valley venture firms, who have considered investing.

A spokeswoman for Snapchat declined to comment.

The investor is neither China’s Alibaba Group nor Japan’s Rakuten, which has put a lot of money in Silicon Valley startups of late, said sources. One interesting possibility would be China’s Internet giant Tencent, which makes money from in-app transactions.

The move by the Los Angeles-based company comes on the heels of another massive funding round raised by social scrapbooking company Pinterest, which announced earlier this week that it just raised $225 million at a $3.8 billion valuation.

Besides the huge piles of investment dough being poured into them, here’s what else the pair have in common: Little to no revenue.

That does not seem to have stopped a panoply of venture and other investors from jumping in and ponying up with huge amounts of cash for the privilege of investing in several fast-growing startups, hoping to grab ahold of the next Twitter or Facebook early.

Launched in 2011, Snapchat has grown wildly popular in a relatively short span of time, effectively creating an entirely new genre of messaging category with its “ephemeral” pictures and videos that last for only a matter of seconds.

Snapchat’s last round – which it called a “scaling round” for infrastructure improvements – was announced in late June, led by Institutional Venture Partners, with participation from General Catalyst Partners and SV Angel. Previous investors Benchmark Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated. With that round, the company had raised around $75 million in total.

Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel

All the fervor has been due to Snapchat’s fast growth and younger demographic. Only a few months ago, co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel boasted that the service had more than 200 million snapped pictures and video taken by its users on a daily basis, up from 150 million just months before. Then in September at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, he said that the number had grown to 350 million self-destructing messages daily.

At the time, there was also an additional $20 million in a secondary offering just four months ago.

At the time of the June funding, in an interview with AllThingsD, Spiegel noted: “We’re excited about in-app transactions because of what we’ve seen in the Asian markets.”

A clue!

Snapchat has clearly been a phenom of late.

Indeed, the app has proved so popular – and potentially worrisome to established social players – that sources said when Spiegel continually rebuffed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s acquisition offers, Zuckerberg cloned the app outright with a service called Poke. Zuckerberg’s offering famously flopped, while Snapchat continues to grow.

Most recently, Snapchat has begun to experiment with features outside of its core ephemeral messaging service. The company launched its Stories product last month, essentially a long-form play on Facebook’s status update in the form of a picture or video. And recently, Spiegel has grown more keen on the idea of monetization, experimenting with bands and listening to music inside the app.

The company, however, has not been without its problems. Early on in its history, Snapchat had to fight the perception that it was a “sexting service” for tweens, a fly-by-night app used to easily spread lewd photos. And it is still involved in ongoing litigation with Frank Brown, a collaborator from the service’s early days, who is suing the company he was pushed out of.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Until, that is, it starts to get annoying.

Facebook has definitely reached that point with some look- and act-alike sites outside of the U.S., according to Mark Zuckerberg. So much so, in fact, that it has hurt the company’s international growth prospects.

“Clones actually end up being a pretty big nuisance. People have made such great clones of Facebook outside the U.S., it made us harder to grow,” Zuckerberg said at the Y Combinator Startup School event over the weekend. Russia in particular, he pointed out, has done the best job of mimicking Facebook’s abilities.

“They’ve made such an awesome clone of Facebook it’s been hard to beat them,” he said. “It’s almost been 10 years since we started Facebook, and we still haven’t beaten them in Russia.”

Zuckerberg gave interesting reasons for the struggle. Besides the fact that the so-called “clones” were first to market in home countries like Russia, he said, many startups would make Facebook lookalikes and then introduce the sites to European countries. From there, Zuckerberg said, the first-movers would appreciate the network effects of viral growth, and make it that much more difficult for Facebook to grow.

One other thing: Some Facebook “clones,” like the ones in Russia, are also home to illegal file-upload hosting services, which makes it a more attractive proposition for those seeking free music and movies to pirate.

Indeed, if you compare Facebook’s quarterly European user-growth rate to other regions (like Asia, which also hosts stiff competition to Facebook with homegrown social sites), it has slowed quite a bit over the past year. Europe, in particular, is important to Facebook, as it is home to far more consumers with money to spend than, say, developing-world nations that are also slowly being introduced to Facebook.

In other words, it’s a big problem that Facebook needs to solve.

One solution? The “lockdown” approach, started in Facebook’s early days by Zuckerberg and co-founder Dustin Moskovitz – basically stopping just short of literally locking the employees inside the building until they come up with a way to fix a problem (though I imagine this isn’t kosher with OSHA).

Or there’s another approach: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Facebook has cloned competing services in the past (Snapchat, Quora, Foursquare). Perhaps the company could take a few cues from what its foreign competitors are doing well.

If you were onstage, talking to Charlie Rose, in front of a very crowded room of ad people, and you were asked to describe the unique qualities of Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg, you might get flustered.

Not Marissa Mayer.

Here’s what the Yahoo CEO had to say about the Google CEO and the Facebook CEO at the IAB/MIXX conference in New York today:

I’ve thought about it before. They each have their superpower.

Larry’s superpower is asking “Why not? Why does it have to be this way?”

I once witnessed a conversation where Larry really started challenging Dean Kamen, the guy who invented the Segway. He started saying “Why, why, why does it have to be this way?”

And he was actually having an argument over a physical constant. Finally [Kamen] said “because it’s a physical constant – an intrinsic property of the universe.”

And so, he loves to ask “why not, why not, why not.” His super power is asking “why not.” On everything. It helps him challenge.

Zuckerberg’s incredibly insightful about people. And that makes him a great leader, it makes him a great recruiter.

And I think it also makes him a great person to run a platform that connects us all. He really understands people and what makes them tick.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to deliver an address on immigration issues in early August, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the first time he has spoken publicly on the matter.

The speech will include the San Francisco premiere of a new film, “Documented,” which chronicles the struggles of undocumented immigrants entering the United States.

The film was written and directed by Jose Antonio Vargas, a writer and immigration rights activist who revealed his own status as an undocumented immigrant in a widely circulated New York Times Magazine article in 2011. (Vargas also wrote a lengthy profile of Zuckerberg for the New Yorker a few years ago.)

The premiere is sponsored by and ties in perfectly with FWD.us, the sometimes controversial Zuckerberg-backed political action group focused on U.S. immigration reform. The issues that FWD.us supports are felt by many tech companies in Silicon Valley; in particular, the focus on changing certain legislation which would allow for more annual H-1B visas, ultimately granting more foreign workers entry into the U.S.

But, as the Chronicle notes, the premiere will be the first time Silicon Valley will enter the wider debate on immigration reform as a whole, rather than just focus on the expansion of visa programs in order to recruit international engineering talent.

The film debuts at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Aug. 5.